It has become common for various types of online service providers to implement data centers having large numbers of computers and associated resources. In some situations, a data center may be built to provide particular services that are associated with a website or entity. In other situations, a data center may support a number of services that are associated with various websites and different entities. In some situations, network-accessible data centers may provide relatively low level computing resources that can be utilized by developers for various purposes on a pay-per-use basis.
A data center consists of a large number of similar or identical computers, which can communicate with each other and with other devices over a network. The network may include a local-area network and/or a wide-area network such as the Internet. The computers may be treated as fungible, with different jobs or workloads being dynamically assigned to available computers.
As data centers have grown in size, power costs and other costs have become increasing concerns. As a result, finding ways to efficiently use all available computing resources has become important.